This volume reports investigations covering a period of three years, dealing with the fundamental facts and forces in learning. It was the author's original purpose to work at certain basic problems until satisfactory solutions were reached; and in general he has done so. But the results suggested certain new problems of such great importance that he has thought it wise to study these also, even without expectation of attaining a final settlement of them. As an indirect consequence of this, one important problem in his original set, that of the relation of the formation of conditional reflexes to associative shifting of the ordinary sort, has been treated only very cursorily.

Table of Contents

Preface

Chapters

Introduction

The Influence of the Repetition of a Situation

The Influence of the Repetition of a Connection Without Belonging

The Influence of the Repetition of a Connection with Belonging

The Influence of the Impressiveness of the First Term Upon the Gain in Strength From a Given Number of Occurrences of the Connection

The Influence of the Distribution of the Occurrences of a Connection Upon Its Strength

The Polarity of Mental Connections

The Influence of Repetition of a Series Upon the Omission of Its Intermediate Terms

The Influence of the After-Effects of a Connection

The Influence of the After-Effects of a Connection When Opportunities to Repeat of Revive It of Any Equivalent of Substitute for It Are Excluded

The Influence of Rewards and Punishments

The Physiological Basis of the Strengthening of Connections by Their After-Effects

Readiness, Identifiability, and Availability

The Influence of Mental Systems

Desires, Purposes, Interests, and Motives

Associative Shifting and the Conditional Reflex

Minor Experiments, Comments, and Suggestions for Further Investigation

Adverse Evidence and Arguments

Appendices

I. Experiments in Responding to a Length by an Estimate of Its Magnitude

II. Experiments in Responding to a Signal by Making a Movement. Experiments 6 to 22

III. Experiments in Connecting Numbers with Words

IV. Materials and Results for Experiment 38, with the Angel Word Number Series

V. Experiments in Learning Code Substitution

VI. Materials for Experiments on the Polarity of Connections

VII. The Influence of Primacy and of Recency

VIII. Estimates of the Influence of, Rewards and Punishments in Various Experiments with Animal Learning